Planteamiento basado en un sistema discreto

All imagos are two-sided. If an image has a depth dimension it must express the dual character of reality. Acknowledging and maintaining the tension of opposites is a fundamental Jungian tenet. One-sidedness begets distortion, perversion, neurosis. Thus, for example, the archetype of the mother expresses the dual aspect of nature, that which giveth and that which taketh away. The Great Mother represents a life force that both begets and destroys, gestates and annihilates. As Dylan Thomas so succinctly put it, ''The force that through the green fuse drives the flower is my destroyer.''59

So, too, the archetype of the father is dual. Father gives life, light, energyno wonder he has historically been associated with the sun. But father can also blast, wither, crush. The preliterate mind, playing with the image of the sun as center of energy, the vitalizing principle, evolved God the Father who energizes and fecundates the feminine earth. Patriarchy replaced the worship of Earth Mother with that of Sky Father. (The halo associated with Christ is a relic of the solar aura of the Father even as the serpent associated with the maternal deities is spurned by the emergent patriarchy in Genesis.) When the experience of the father is positive, the child experiences strength, support, the energizing of his own resources and modeling in the outer world. When the experience of the father is negative, the fragile psyche is crushed.

To use a modern metaphor, the child's psyche is a set of potentialities, a data base to be shaped by the affirmation and modeling of the parents. Through his mother he may experience the world as a nurturing and protective environment. From father he may receive the empowerment to enter the world and to fight for his life. Of course

59 "The Force That Through the Green Fuse," in Norton Anthology of Poetry, p. 1176.

mother can help empower him and father nurture him, but archetypally they play specific roles. Mother also activates the mother complex, which must be transformed and transcended lest he remain childlike and dependent. He must leave the world of the mother and enter that of the fathers. All mythology is a playing out of some variant of two great mythologems. The mythology of the Great Mother is the great circle, the death-rebirth motif, the Eternal Return. The mythology of the Sky Father is the quest, the journey from innocence to experience, from dark to light, from home to the horizon. Each mythic cycle must be served.

When the parental imagos in the child are inadequately modeled by the parents, he carries the deficit throughout his life. He longs for something missing, even as he might carry a vitamin deficiency and crave a certain food. He unconsciously seeks the dormant energies of his psyche through others. He may impose the nurturant role on his wife, for example, and be angry when she does not mother him even though consciously he would not let her. Or he may relinquish his own private journey to serve another man's, unconsciously seeking the missing father imago. He may be full of rage for the failure of his father to father, or for the absence of cultural fathers, or he may carry a secret grief for his lost father.

Just as we spent considerable time looking at the power of the mother complex in a man's life two chapters ago, so we must acknowledge that such power is rendered even greater by the incompletely activated father imago. What the personal father must be, among other things, is the third point in the triangle of parents and child. If he is missing, literally or psychologically, the mother's power will be unbalanced. Or if, unduly influenced by his own mother complex, the father acts in a brutal, repressive fashion as the familial power broker, he similarly fails to model a healthy rapprochement with the feminine that the child needs to witness. The old father-knows-best family model was too one-sided to be healthy. Few of us grew up seeing our parents as equal agents, democratic forces balancing, supporting, complementing each other.

In Finding Our Fathers, Sam Osherson cites a broad study

indicat-ing that only seventeen per cent of American men had a positive relationship with their fathers. In most cases the father was dead, divorced and missing, chemically impaired or emotionally absent.60 If this amazing statistic is even close to the truth, something large and tragic has happened to one of the critical balances of nature. Indeed, Robert Bly asserts that the father-son relationship is the most damaged of all relationships since the industrial revolution.61

Thus the seventh great secret that bedevils the male soul: each man carries a deep longing for his father and for his tribal fathers.

When fathers and sons stopped working together in the fields, in the small trades, when the family left the land and migrated to the cities where the jobs were, when father left home and went to the factory and the office, the son was left behind. No more the shared toil, no more the transmission of one's craft, no more the bonding of a boy with his dad. Father dragged himself home from a brutalizing day in the heat of the assembly line or the paper shuffling of the office. Perhaps he had a few on the way home. James Joyce tells the story of a father who, having been trashed by his boss, scorned by his friends, rejected by a woman, walks in the house and, "for no reason," beats his son.

The degradation of his soul that day is visited on the only one over whom he still has power.62

Fathers so often return home dispirited and soul-worn. They can hardly model a positive masculine imago for their sons when they feel the Saturnian oppression so keenly. There is no point in a man blaming his father, for his father could then blame his father. The chain of cause and effect reaches back to the beginnings of industrial and urban man. When the tribe was absorbed into the larger society, the chance for man-to-man transmissions was virtually lost. We can scarcely go back to tribalism, although one feature of the men's movement has been to try to recapture a sense of it by drumming and chanting, and by bringing men together to share their stories.

60Finding Our Fathers, p. 18.

61Iron John: A Book About Men. pp. 19ff.

62 "Counterparts," in The Portable James Joyce, pp. 97109.

Certainly the idea of activating a positive masculine imago is appropriate and male bonding experiences do further that goal. But most men will never be exposed to such opportunities, and, for many who are, the effect of the group experience does not last. What father cannot access in himself cannot be passed on to his son. And we cannot look to corporate boardrooms or the church for the tribal fathers today. So all men, whether they know it or not, hunger for their father and grieve over his loss. They long for his body, his strength, his wisdom.

Literature is full of illustrations of the search that transpires within the youth for the activation of the masculine principle. A fine example is Franz Kafka's short story "The Judgment,"63 where the personal father complex is extended to include his ambivalence toward the patriarchs of his Judaic heritage and even to Yahwehstern and demanding, as well as absent and unavailable.

In the story a young man suffers under the omniscient eye of his father. He has secretly been writing to a male friend in Russia. (For the Prague-born Kafka, Russia, at the beginning of this century, would have represented something akin to our nineteenth-century "wild west,"

a land of frontier adventure.) The friend is urging the youth to join him. Obviously the youth longs for adventure and is eager to accept the summons to journey from home to horizon. But his father finds the cache of letters. He says to the son, "I sentence you to die." The son dutifully treks through the city, crosses a bridge, and, at story's end, jumps to his death in the river.

This denouement shocks the reader. But Kafka, whom W.H. Auden said stands in relationship to our age as Dante did to his,64 is an unparalleled writer of parables. Kafka's stories are letters to his secret self, penned in an effort to escape an iron father and stultifying tradition, though death seems the only escape from the grim, gray city of oppression. By what power, what authority, even what motive, can the father exercise such an effect over his son? Just as a

63 In The Penal Colony, pp. 4966.

64The Dyer's Hand, p. 159.

glance at Medusa's face would turn men to stone in classical mythology, so we have in "The Judgment" a portrayal of the power of the negative father complex. This Saturnian shadow has the capacity to fall over a son's spirit and crush him. The son reaches out for a positive masculine experience with his friend, but, for reasons not explained, the father trumbles to his rival and shuts off his son's only hope of escape. The complex, then, has the power to cut off his spirit, to tamp the fires of life and plunge him into the obliterating waters of the unconscious. So, instead of bringing his son light, the father brings suffocating darkness.

Such negative fathers built what Blake called the "dark, satanic mills."65 They also built Auschwitz. They built arrogant theologies that burned men at the stake and crushed them on the wheel. They have created an iron world without light, without soul. When their sons reach out for life they crush and destroy them.

Quite another example of the quest for the father may be seen in Nathaniel Hawthorne's story, "My Kinsman, Major Molineaux." A youth named Robin sets off to find fame and fortune in Boston, assisted he hopes by his kinsman Major Molineaux, whom he must find. Naive and innocent, he gets lost in the city whose winding streets are a maze, like the convolutions of his own psyche. Everywhere he goes he asks for his kinsman and is surprised to see Bostonians pull back from him. He does not know that the Revolution is brewing and his kinsman is a much-hated royalist official. As night falls his confidence and his consciousness diminish also. He is swept up into a passing mob of men painted as savages. Soon he is howling in their midst. Only then does he realize that he has found his kinsman, tarred and feathered, no helping father but a broken old man. Robin is stunned at finding the violence of the mob in himself and realizes he must make his own way in the world.

Hawthorne's story typifies a young man's need for a father figure, a mentor who will help him over the bridge from his mother complex to the empowered male world beyond. But, like most

65 "And Did Those Feet," in Norton Anthology of Poetry, p. 510.

modern men, Robin does not find the mentor he needs. He finds only a wounded man like others, and a darkness within himself which thereafter he must carry consciously. We might recall the massive shadow projection that fell onto Hitler in the thirties. The Hitler Jugend was filled with youths who longed for the activation of their inner hero. They responded to the summons to ideals, sacrifice and communal identification. The appeal of John Kennedy to youthful idealism and heroic need is a more benign example. What Robin found was that there were no helpful fathers, only the abaissement du niveau mentale of the mob. In the end he is on his own.

A more positive outcome of the quest for a helpful male companion is seen in Joseph Conrad's novella The Secret Sharer. The protagonist is a young captain taking on his first command in the South China Sea. Nervous and insecure, he tries to befriend his crew who immediately smell his fear and belittle him behind his back. He knows only to be friend or tyrant, both extremes undermining his power to command.

While walking the deck one night he sees a man in the surf and pulls him aboard. Instinctively he knows he must harbor and protect this man. Later a ship pulls alongside, searching for a man who has acted boldly but murdered a shipmate. The young captain, despite his duty to serve and support the law of the sea, covers for his mysterious visitor.

The man he fished from the sea seems to have all the qualities the young captain lacks. He is in fact his shadow, his Doppelganger or double. At story's end the young captain, having assimilated the psychic influence of the fugitive, puts his ship through some complicated and perilous maneuvers in order to put the man safely ashore. Out of these actions the crew comes to respect the young captain, for he has obviously grasped and now models the requisite moral authority necessary to exercise command.

What the young captain needed was not knowledgehe had already learned that at the naval academybut inner strength, inner authority.

What the mysterious visitor represented was his own shadow potential. They shared a secret, the secret that outer authority must spring from inner authority. This secret sharing is the

mentor-ing all men need. Since they are seldom able to feel their inner authority, men must spend their lives deferrmentor-ing to others or throwmentor-ing their outer weight around in compensation for their sense of inner weakness. Unlike the Kafka story, where the negative father crushes the child's spirit, or Hawthorne's where the mentor disappoints, Conrad's story illustrates positive mentoring.

All sons need something from their fathers. They especially need their father to say he loves and accepts them as they are.66 Too many men have distorted their individuation journey because their father did not affirm them. The sons naturally thought they must adjust themselves, twist their nature, to win his approval. Often they win approval by trying to fulfill the father's expectations. Sometimes they spend their life seeking that approval from others. Or, lacking the father's affirmation, they internalize this deficit as a phenomenological statement about themselves. ("If I were worthy, I would have his love. Since I do not, I am unworthy.")

I recall one man in his late thirties who for years had carried a deep sense of shame and low self-esteem. When his father was dying of emphysema the man asked, "Why were we not close to each other?" The father, with perhaps forty-eight hours to live, replied, "Do you remember when you were ten you dropped a toy down the toilet and I had to spend the whole day getting it out?" He went on to recount similar incidents, all trivial. The son left the hospital realizing that his father's only gift was to demonstrate that he was crazy. For almost four decades the son had thought he was unworthy. Only after this death-bed conversation did the son's wounded self-image begin to heal.

Sons also need to watch their father in the world. They need him to show them how to be in the world, how to work, how to bounce back from adversity, how to stand in right relationship to the feminine, outer and inner. They need the activation of their inherent

mas-66 As a therapist I have seldom witnessed more pain than that suffered by a man who never knew his father's love and approval. This wound is most keenly felt by gay men whose fathers, insecure in their own identity, rejected and abandoned their sons.

culinity both by outer modeling and by direct affirmation. Telling a boy not to cry, not to be a sissy, is only to further a life-long self-alienation. Showing him how to be honest in his emotions, how to get up off the floor and back into the fraythe necessary woundingis what each son needs. He needs to be shown that it is perfectly human to be afraid and, while afraid, that one is still obliged to live one's life and to undertake one's journey.

Sons need to have father tell them what they need to know to live "out there," and how to live with integrity. Sons need to see father living his life, struggling, being emotional, failing and falling, getting up again, being human. When the son does not see his father honestly living his personal journey, then the son will have to find his paradigms elsewhere, or, worse, unconsciously live out the father's untaken journey.

This is in accordance with Jung's observation that the greatest burden the child must bear is the unlived life of the parents.67 On this theme the Rilke poem I quoted in The Middle Passage merits repeating here:

Sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,

because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his own house, stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses, so that his children have to go far out into the world toward that same church which he forgot.68

The church to which Rilke alludes emphasizes the sacred nature of the journey. (As with Kafka, the Prague-born Rilke would see the

"East" as the frontier.) In the one case the father takes his journey, albeit painfully so. In the other, the father stays home, fearful, and his children must overcompensate for what he left undone.

Of course the father's journey need not be a literal departure, but each man must depart in some way from the collective, from security, from his silent mother complex, if he is to become himself.

67 See above, pp. 5455.

68Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, p. 49.

When he does not, in whatever way, blaze his own trail through the dense forest, he becomes part of the psychic entanglement hindering his son's journey.

A father may be physically present, but absent in spirit. His absence may be literal through death, divorce or dysfunction, but more often it is a symbolic absence through silence and the inability to transmit what he also may not have acquired. Dad's defection means that the balance of the parent-child triangle is tipped and the motherson dyad assumes a disproportionate weight. As well intentioned as most mothers are, they can hardly be expected to initiate their sons into something they are not. Without a father to pull him out of the mother

A father may be physically present, but absent in spirit. His absence may be literal through death, divorce or dysfunction, but more often it is a symbolic absence through silence and the inability to transmit what he also may not have acquired. Dad's defection means that the balance of the parent-child triangle is tipped and the motherson dyad assumes a disproportionate weight. As well intentioned as most mothers are, they can hardly be expected to initiate their sons into something they are not. Without a father to pull him out of the mother